Why hundreds of people in L.A. are strapping cameras on their bodies to do chores

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The hottest new gig-economy job in Los Angeles is performing at home to help artificial intelligence understand how humans move.Hundreds of people from Santa Monica to Los Feliz are strapping cameras on their heads and hands as they do chores at home so bots can watch how they make coffee, scrub toilets, water plants and wash dishes.

At a corner table at Urth Caffe downtown, a woman is sitting next to a big black bag.A constant flow of visitors stops by.

She slips each a package and instructions, and they move on.“People think I am selling” drugs, she says.She’s actually a manager for a San Francisco-based recruitment firm called Instawork, and she’s handing out headbands with phone mounts, a simple piece of equipment that lets people record their every move — movements that will be turned into data to train robots how to act.

Business AI-powered delivery robots from companies like Serve Robotics are replacing human drivers across the nation — but they can’t do it without help.She hands Salvador Arciga a headmount and tells him to go home and do the dishes and clean his kitchen.He has done odd jobs all over town: DoorDash delivery, handing out hats at Dodger Stadium, washing dishes at Disneyland, hanging holiday lights at the Los Angeles Zoo and more.

This job seems relatively easy, and it pays $80 for two hours of footage.“I need to do chores anyway,” he says.“Now I get a chance to get paid to do it.”AI chatbots like ChatGPT learned to converse, make music, generate images, and write code by using all the information they could get from the internet.

Now, as AI and robotics companies figure out how to do the same in the physical world, the models need much more information about real-world movements.Business Miso Robotics in Pasadena is one of several tech startups betting their robots will appeal to fast-food chains searching for new ways to save mone...